1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a terminal device preferably applied as a mobile phone and a control method applied to the terminal device, and particularly, to a technique applied to a terminal device having a vibrator for notifying an incoming call and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the past, there has been widely used a mobile phone that has a vibrator for vibrating its body and has a function of notifying incoming calls or mails by vibration of the vibrator, instead of ringing. Such vibrator is configured, for example, such that an eccentric weight, which is attached to a rotation shaft, is rotated by a motor (vibration motor).
To vibrate the vibrator in the mobile phone, the vibrator is, for example, operated continuously or intermittently during calling operation. Therefore, for example, if the calling operation continues for a relatively long period of time of several tens of seconds, the vibrator is also operated continuously or intermittently for the long period of time.
In addition to the usage of the vibrator continuously operating as described above, there exists a case where, at the time of operating a touch panel of the terminal device by finger touch, the terminal device is temporarily vibrated by the vibrator in order to feed back to the touching finger that the operation is made. With the feedback of the operation by the vibration as described above, an operator can obtain a sense of operation similar to that in a case of operating a general keyboard and can obtain a favorable operability, even in a case of using the touch panel.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-330618 describes a terminal device having a touch panel, in which, when the touch panel is touched, pulse signals are supplied to a vibrating element and the vibrating element is temporarily vibrated to implement the feedback.